The Touch of Twilight

by Vicki Pettersson

  Tekla fell silent, and when it became apparent she wasn’t going to remove the mask without prompting, Warren put a gentle hand to her shoulder. She startled, jumping like she’d forgotten where she was, and when she removed the mask, her face was wet with tears. She let Warren take it away, expression disoriented and mildly disappointed as she stepped back again, tucking unsteady hands into the sleeves of her robe.

  Three more people tried on the mask and three times it showed various predictions of success; Vanessa’s vision spoke of love, Jewell’s of worthiness, and Gregor physically overcame a Shadow agent he didn’t recognize, besting the giant man even with just one good arm. When it came time for Hunter to reveal what he saw, he only said the others were right; it was most definitely the near future. And though the look on his face was benign enough, I sensed chaos swirling through his bloodstream. I studied him as he avoided my gaze, but by this time even Warren was displaying uncommon excitement. He turned to me, eyes gleaming.

  “Your turn, Olivia.”

  I didn’t want to. I knew it was my almost pathological need for control, a knee-jerk reaction caused by past helplessness that had me mentally rearing back when he held the animist’s mask out to me, but I thought I saw the wood twitch in his hand, and it didn’t look benign to me at all. It looked anticipatory. It looked hungry.

  You’re safe, I told myself, taking the mask, feeling nothing but smooth wood in the weight against my palm. I was in the warehouse, in the panic room, surrounded by my troop. What could happen?

  The magic slipped on easily, dimming my awareness of my surroundings like a sun visor, and the muscles in my thighs twitched as a facsimile of me strode forward to knock on the door of Xavier’s home office, a reproduction of my conduit loaded and locked.

  The door was ajar and swung open like every horror movie cliché I’d ever seen. Apparently none too bright, the faux me made my way through the smoke of the exterior office to the hidden room beyond the far bookcase. I stepped through the threshold…and onto the roof of the tallest hotel in Vegas, recognizing the view from the apex of Valhalla. It was night, and the Strip was spilled out below me like a blinding waterfall, headlights and digital billboards cascading to and fro in a rapid river of activity that couldn’t reach me up here. Even the wind had been muted, I noted, looking around, which was when I spotted the two chairs balanced on the hotel’s ledge.

  Not chairs, I thought, drawing closer. Thrones. Gold-plated, cushionless monstrosities I’d seen before, and I tilted my head as I slipped in front of the larger one, lifting my bow when I saw the Tulpa reclined there, dressed like a mafia don. I’d been anticipating him.

  He tracked me with his eyes, the rest of him still, balanced on that ledge. I edged over to the smaller throne, and took a seat opposite him, my left foot dangling off into space. I wasn’t afraid, and I don’t know if his smile was because of that or in spite of it.

  “All of this,” he said, motioning below, “Can be yours.”

  I looked at the vibrant city, and despite the zinging neon, random flares, and bustling crowds, saw peace. The smooth currents of air rippling over the quiet desert made me homesick, if only because I was so clearly removed from it. “If?” I asked, returning my gaze to him.

  He chuckled in answer, and bent forward to pick up a brown paper lunch bag. His throne wobbled, one gilt leg halfway over the ledge. Bulging at the bottom, the bag snapped open crisply, and he lifted out a sandwich wrapped in foil.

  “Split it with me?”

  The city danced below us. The air continued to swirl. I glanced back at the sandwich and after a moment more, inclined my head. A truce, if possible, would be nice.

  He handed me half, not a barbed claw in sight, and I unwrapped it, first the foil, then plastic wrap.

  “Meat, tomato, cheese, lettuce, and mustard…your favorite, right?”

  My eyes came to rest on the bag now perched on his golden armrest, and I caught myself mid-nod, mid-bite. The bottom of the bag was oozing blackly. The sandwich pulsed once in my palm.

  The Tulpa crossed his legs at the knee and smiled. “A divided heart, get it?”

  I lunged, and knew from the air’s current that my throne had toppled from the ledge. Horns honked as it turned into a missile; mortals screamed. The Tulpa tried to get away, but his teetering throne banked, and he threw himself toward the rooftop…right into my arms. His jugular called to me, as brightly pulsing as the city below us, and I grabbed for it. I saw the seams only because I was so close, and ignoring the rest of his body, I squeezed. Two muted pops sounded, like snaps coming undone, then another jaw appeared above my pressing thumbs. With a howl of rage I tore the Tulpa’s face away, lifting so tissue and tendons ripped…and the doppelgänger gazed up at me with a smile.

  “It’s better this way,” she choked the words out, strangling. “A person cannot be divided against herself.”

  I squeezed harder. Her smile widened. And in the moment the light left her eyes, her shining skull popped like a balloon, suds and frothy bubbles flying everywhere. I yelled out in victory. The sun took to the sky like a comet…and revealed one more face beneath my clenched palms.

  The jaw was slender and heart-shaped, the fragile skin smooth and too white. Frantically I wiped away the foam…and stared down into my mother’s waxy, sightless face.

  I pivoted…and found the city rotting like a carcass beneath a scorching desert sun.

  I could only stare as all the people I knew rotted with it.

  “Olivia! Olivia! It’s off, stop struggling!”

  It was only then I became aware of my voice, a sandpaper scream sawing through my brain. Get it off! Get it off! Make it stop!

  A white-hot pain arched around my jaw as my cheeks parted from my bones, as if cleaved with a burning, jagged blade. “God! Oh God!”

  “I had to,” said an unfamiliar voice. No, not unfamiliar. New. I opened my eyes, blinked back stinging tears, and saw Kimber staring down at me with those hard blue eyes. “The textbooks say it’s the most effective way of separating joined psyches. The skin should grow back.”

  Skin? And should? I panicked, but then Micah pushed her aside, and my vision narrowed on him. His reaction would tell me whether I should worry, whether the biting cold all around my jawline was as serious as I thought. Whether the ripping of my own skin from my bones should be cause for alarm.

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes as he spoke in an overly soothing voice, “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Oh shit…” I began to cry.

  “Shh.” He lifted his hands, fingertips pressing gently across my face. I was numb, and didn’t feel them. “No, it is. Your magic is already grafting the skin back in place. You’ll be as good as new in a few minutes.”

  It would have been like consulting with any other doctor if he hadn’t used magic and grafting in the same sentence. Laughter wanted to bubble up out of me, except it couldn’t get past my throat, past the skin rent from ear to ear. I squeezed my eyes shut, and both wished for, and dreaded, my complete healing.

  Because then I’d have to tell them of the vision contradicting all the premonitions they’d experienced. I opened my eyes and found Tekla ushering everyone from the room. Chandra was the last, and she looked back, met my gaze, and shuddered.

  The sooner you start respecting that your compromised physiology has made you different, the sooner you can start approaching aberrant situations from a new beginning point…

  Fuck you, Chandra, I thought, and let myself cry again. Just fuck you. Fuck the Tulpa…and fuck me too.

  13

  Half an hour later I was alone with Warren in what amounted to a crow’s nest above the cavernous expanse of Hunter’s workshop. There was a bed pressed against two walls near the back, a simple press-wood desk pushed against the forward railing, which was where I was seated, and nothing but a tattered rug in between. Hunter didn’t use the place often, preferring instead to return to the sanctuary each evening, crossing realities as faithfully as most peop
le put in their nine-to-fives.

  Half the troop had left, though Vanessa and Riddick were talking in low voices as they waited for their partners, while Hunter showed Kimber the conduit he was designing for her. I watched her gesture excitedly below us, beaming, no doubt telling him it was just how she’d envisioned it while wearing the animist’s mask.

  The evil, life-sucking mask.

  “It started with the Tulpa,” I told Warren, hands cupped around a cup of coffee so bad it was soothing for its heat alone. I’d shifted the chair so it was sideways to the desk, and Warren stood, cross-armed, five feet away, near the ladder leading below. “I distinctly saw him sitting in a throne above the entire city. He offered Las Vegas to me, said it could be mine.”

  I told him the rest, the multiple masks, my mother’s face beneath. My mother who’d handed me a heart. My mother, whom I’d killed.

  “Hm…” he said, like that was significant, looking out over the cavernous workshop.

  “Hm, what?” I asked. Warren’s eyes were tight, whatever scene he was playing out in his mind superimposed over the inactivity of the workshop, but then they relaxed and he turned to face me.

  “You can’t let what happened with the mask scare you. You’re a good person, Joanna. Even when you act impulsively, even when you’ve gone against my orders or spoken out of turn—”

  “Who, me?”

  He ignored that. “You’re doing so from a moral seat. More importantly, even if the third portent of the Zodiac is the rise of your Shadow side, I believe you’d find a way to overcome that and do what’s right.”

  “I want to believe you,” I said, shaking my head, palming my cup. “But I just had a vision where I killed my own mother by hand, and I know myself—even this new version of myself—by now. The rage and exultation when my hands were around her throat…that was real.”

  “And so was the horror when you realized who it really was.”

  “Yeah, but by then it was too late!” And that was my constant fear. That no matter what abilities my kairotic powers gave me, my late entrée into this paranormal morass would leave me flat-footed when it mattered most. That was why I had problems sitting on my heels, waiting for direction. Besides, eight months of the strongest supernatural support couldn’t erase a decade of self-reliance. Other than Olivia, the people I’d counted on most had always abandoned me.

  He leaned against the railing, reminding me of the way the Tulpa had shifted, his throne tottering on that thin ledge. Seeing my shudder, Warren winced, sighed, and dug into the pockets of his long, filthy duster.

  “I wasn’t going to give you this yet. But since you seem to be a slave to that which you’ve seen both in visions and reality—”

  “Hey!” I said, jerking so hard I spilled coffee over my hands and knees. I sat the Styrofoam cup on the desk, and flicked droplets from my wrists before wiping them against my pants. “The things I’ve seen could make grown men weep, then drool, then do nothing but rock in a corner for the rest of their lives.”

  “Exactly.” He pulled out a crumpled stack of papers stapled together at the corner and handed them to me. “I checked into Regan’s account of what happened the night you left Ben alone with a man named Ernest Thompson, a.k.a., Magnum, in a barricaded alley called Dog Run. As you asked.”

  I narrowed my eyes and cautiously took the papers from him, then scanned the first page. A drug dealer named Magnum had been found facedown in the dirt of a public housing lot, a single bullet to his head. The report called it self-defense, but I knew that wasn’t possible. I’d left Magnum knocked out at Ben’s feet just as the sirens from his backup came wheeling around the corner. There was no way Magnum had woken up and threatened Ben in those intervening seconds. The report began to shake in my hands.

  “Why are you showing this to me now?”

  “Joanna,” he said softly, and I shut my eyes so I didn’t have to see if the look on his face matched the pity in his voice. “Your back has been to the wall so many times I’m surprised you don’t have a permanent imprint there. But the person who did this had a choice and still took the lesser action, and that’s what a person’s Shadow side is. The wrong decision even under the right circumstances.” He paused, thinking by doing so he was letting that sink in, but what filled the gap was another denial. I hadn’t seen it, so maybe Ben wasn’t the one who decided to be this man’s executioner. Warren took a breath. “You need to let us erase his memory. It’s the best way to get rid of Regan. It’ll be a fresh start for Ben. And for you.”

  I wiped at my eyes. “No.”

  “Joanna—”

  “No!” I screamed, crumpling the report in one fist.

  The warehouse stilled below, but Warren didn’t let the sound or sudden blooming smoke bother him. The alarm clock across from me reflected red-hot eyes in the glass front, but he didn’t let that scare him either. He waited, cross-armed, until my breathing had evened again, the smoke clearing. “I don’t have to ask your permission, you know.”

  I knew. He could take chunks of memory away and Ben would become the person he’d have been if I’d never entered his life. And he wouldn’t think or speak or dream of me ever again. I pressed the palms of my hands to my eyes until I saw black spots, then pulled them away as a sigh stuttered from my chest.

  “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?”

  I don’t know if he was more taken aback by the whimper in my voice or the change in subject, but Warren only stared, eyes jumping around my face like it was a puzzle he needed to put together. I managed a tired smile and smoothed the report back out over my knees. “You don’t have to tell me every little detail…in fact, don’t. Just your first thought.”

  He shrugged after another moment. “Okay.”

  “Now let me guess. You don your superhero cloak. You pound your chest. You yell, ‘Up, up, and away!’ and run from the Batcave, catapulting into the air.”

  “You’re mixing up your superheroes.”

  I looked at the man who was both troop leader and bum. That was the truth.

  “If I’m on the streets,” he began, crossing his legs at the ankles, leaning back and humoring me, “I take a piss and try to find some food. If I’m in the sanctuary, I take a piss, a shower, and then try to find some food.”

  “I told you not to tell me.” I winced, and he laughed, and it was suddenly a little easier between us. “The point is, you don’t wake up thinking, Hey, I’m going to save the world today! Right?”

  He lifted a brow. “Do you?”

  “No,” I said, but before he could ask anything more I leaned toward him, lowering my voice. “I wake up and think, There’s some fucker out there with a knife in his pocket. He’s going to go a little postal today. And he might do it around Ben.”

  I licked my lips, aware of Warren’s gaze on me now, absent of humor. I stared back, equally serious. “I think about the people out there with too much artillery and too little brains and how today they might start firing, again, around Ben.”

  “And what about the other two million inhabitants of our fine city?”

  “Do you consider each and every one of them every time you intervene in human drama?” I replied shortly. “Maybe you should, and maybe I should too, but I’m too preoccupied with the one who best represents goodness and fairness and kindness to me, who represents them all.”

  Warren slid the photo of Magnum back under my nose, a reminder that after an intervening decade I might not know Ben at all. But that wasn’t true…because if I didn’t know him, I couldn’t love him. And I did.

  One side of Warren’s mouth turned up in a wry, humorless smile. “And what if you wake up one day and he’s the fucker with the knife and the mean opportunity?”

  I shook my head. “I tell myself the truth. He’s under the influence of Regan, who comes from a long line of women who enjoy destroying the virtue in a good man. And then I remind myself that he spent years before that under my influence, and I don’t mean to
let him get away without a fight.”

  “So it’s a game?” he said quickly.

  “Sure,” I said lightly, though it wasn’t. “A game of chance. And I want mine. Because I know if I can get him to talk to me I can fix this.” Because no matter what was printed on these pages or what Warren thought Ben might have done to another mortal on a night when he was cornered like a wild animal…I knew he’d listen. And if he listened I could alter whatever Regan had fucked up inside him already.

  Warren shifted where he sat and I found I couldn’t meet his eye, not with tears in my own. I glanced back down at the warehouse, and saw Hunter placing the foam template I’d handled earlier in a locked cabinet shoved against a concrete wall. When I’d finally recovered my voice, and was sure it wouldn’t crack in my throat, I whispered, “Not yet. Please.”

  I saw him stiffen from the corner of my eye, shift uncomfortably, and knew I’d said the wrong thing. Pleading was a weak emotion, and Warren responded best to the logic of the mind. “You need to focus on the Tulpa.”

  I started to laugh. The sound spiraled, escaping me in a raw and wild vortex, like a tiny tornado tearing through the workshop. The agents below fell silent again and looked up, trying to see what was so funny. It made me laugh even harder.

  “Focus on him,” I gasped, wiping at my eyes, then bent over to pick up the papers I’d caused to splay all over the floor. More calculations and drawings, more templates, more weapons. I tapped them on the desk in a halfhearted effort at neatness before tossing them down. “Every one of us is so fucking focused it’s like living under a microscope.”

  And I told him what the Tulpa said about the doppelgänger being fixed on me, that a fleshly relic—my heart—would allow her full physical manifestation, and that she’d stop at nothing to get it. I also told him the Tulpa no longer wanted me as one of his Shadows. “I have ill chi. He said we could work together to kill the double-walker because I had as much to lose as he, but that’s all he wants.”